“For as long as I can remember, mother never took a day off. Father slept all day and got drunk and beat her at night, but she would be back in the fields the next morning.”

Jagyani Sravanthi’s mother Gongalla Vijaya, a farmer, killed herself in December 2016 in Ramnagar Thanda near Jangalapally in Telangana’s Jayashankar Bhupalapally district. Telangana recorded the largest number of suicides among women farmers in 2015, according to the National Crime Records Bureau of India. Data for 2016 is still awaited.

From a recent assignment for OPEN magazine, working on an issue extremely close to my heart- India’s agrarian crisis. Please read the story by V Shoba here.